Cyber Researcher Cancels Public Talk on How to Hack Face ID

BY Evan Selleck

Published 4 Jan 2019

To date, Apple’s confidence in its latest biometric security measure, Face ID, has panned out. But that may not always be the case.

However, today is not the day that someone has figured out how to bypass the security gate. Or, to be specific, a future talk at the Black Hat Asia conference is not where we’ll hear about how someone might be able to bypass Face ID. Wish Wu is a cyber researcher that works for the research firm Ant Financial, and he has told Reuters that his upcoming talk at the aforementioned securities conference, which was entitled “Bypass Strong Face ID: Everyone Can Deceive Depth and IR Camera and Algorithms”, has been canceled.

According to the report, Wu agreed on the cancelation of the talk at the conference in part because the methodology to bypass Face ID only worked on the iPhone X and under “certain conditions”. The bypass method is apparently not able to bypass Face ID on the iPhone XS or iPhone XS Max at all, under any circumstances.

Here’s what Wu told Reuters on the matter:

“In order to ensure the credibility and maturity of the research results, we decided to cancel the speech.”

Facial recognition is a secure method to lock down devices. At least, Face ID has proven to be just that. In 2017, we heard about hackers bypassing the iris recognition system in the Samsung Galaxy S8, for instance, so the technology used in these security measures is vitally important.

[via Reuters]